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To Prevent Injury, Train Your Tendons

When it comes to exercise, muscles and bones are clearly the stars of the show. But to feel your best and age well, you also need to take a little time each week to exercise the body’s supporting cast: connective tissues like ligaments and tendons, especially if you’ve injured them in the past. How you do it matters. What works for ligaments doesn’t work for tendons, and vice versa. “Each part responds to different stimulus,” said Jay Dicharry, a professor of physical therapy at Oregon State University and the author of “Running Rewired.” “Just as you don’t treat each of your children the same, you shouldn’t treat all of your body parts the same way.”

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Articles of Interest

For Tendon Pain, Think Beyond the Needle

Two time-honored remedies for injured tendons seem to be falling on their faces in well-designed clinical trials. The first, corticosteroid injections into the injured tendon, has been shown to provide only short-term relief, sometimes with poorer long-term results than doing nothing at all. The second, resting the injured joint, is supposed to prevent matters from getting worse. But it may also fail to make them any better. Rather, working the joint in a way that doesn’t aggravate the injury but strengthens supporting tissues and stimulates blood flow to the painful area may promote healing faster than “a tincture of time.”

How To Improve Our Tendon Health with Training

“In general, what you want for your ligaments is for them to be as stiff and strong as possible,” said Dr. Baar. “The stiffer the ligament the better the structural support. The same is not true of tendons. If tendons are too stiff, muscle injuries are more likely to occur.

How to Keep Your Tendons Healthy as You Age

With so much focus on strength training to build new muscle and slow the age-related muscle loss, it’s easy to forget that another type of tissue that changes with age–your tendons. Just as we work our muscles to keep them healthy, it’s important to keep your tendons healthy and resistant to injury too. These strong, flexible bands of connective tissue matter! Tendons are a weak link for some people, and if you tear one it can make it hard to exercise for weeks or months. In addition, tendons are susceptible to injury from overuse. That’s why it’s important not to do the same exercises over and over without allowing your muscles and tendons adequate time to rest and repair.

How to Strengthen Tendons and Ligaments With Strength Training

Strength training is usually associated with building muscle, but as an endurance athlete, you also need to build connective tissue strength. Your tendons, in particular, are responsible for transferring force generated by muscle contraction to bone to whatever you are trying to move or push against (like a weight, a pedal, or the ground). This movement of force creates an elastic recoil effect known as the stretch-shortening cycle (SSC) that helps you to run, jump, and make a variety of other movements. In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of connective tissue, how to strengthen tendons and ligaments, and how that can help improve your athletic performance.

Protect Your Tendons

You’ve probably heard of such sports injuries as tennis elbow or jumper’s knee. These are just 2 examples of tendinitis, a painful condition caused by overusing and straining the joints in your body. Tendons are the tough but flexible bands of tissue that connect muscle to bones. You have about 4,000 tendons throughout your body. Tendons make it possible for you to bend your knee, rotate your shoulder, and grasp with your hand.

Tendon and Ligament Injuries

A sprain is an injury to the ligaments which are soft tissue structures that stabilize a joint. Ligaments are strong, flexible fibers that hold bones together. When a ligament is stretched too far or tears, the joint will become painful and swell. Sprains are caused when a joint is forced to move into an unnatural position. For example, "twisting" one's ankle causes a sprain to the ligaments around the ankle. Tendons are the soft tissues that connect muscles to bone and allow joints to move. Overuse activities can cause inflammation of the tendon and this is called tendonitis. Tendons in the upper extremity can also be cut in deep lacerations.

Tendon overuse injuries (tendinopathy): Learn More – How are tendon overuse injuries treated?

Some people use painkillers to relieve the symptoms. Other treatments include cooling the area, ultrasound therapy and massages. But these approaches haven’t been proven to help: Some haven't been studied at all, or research on a treatment has looked at the effects on only some tendons, so it’s not clear whether they would help when used on other tendons in the body.

The Science About Tending to Tendon Health

Chances are you’re not giving your tendons the proper attention they deserve. Here’s what science tells us about tendon health.

Resources

7 Crucial Facts You Didn't Know about Tendons

We are not able to repair/heal degenerative tendon pathology. In other words, no surgery, no shockwave therapy, no injections whatsoever, and not even exercise are able to repair or heal a degenerated tendon...

And Your Tendon

Regardless of what tendonitis you may be suffering from (knee, hip, shoulder, elbow, ankle), the treatment stages are the same. The location of the treatment is wherever the inflamed tendon may be.